Smart Helmet Helps Diagnose Football Injuries

Football is back! (yes, robotics enthusiasts can also enjoy a bit of handegg)

As ESPN and Fox Sports start spewing oceans of player stats, one stat that often gets ignored is probably the most important; head injuries. This isn’t just a problem in the NFL, it’s an issue wherever the sport is played, in colleges, and especially in high schools. Just two weeks into the high school football season, there have been 7 football related deaths. Last year, there were 13 the entire season. According to the NFL’s Injury Data results (released in Jan. 2016), there were 182 concussions during the 2015 regular season, a 58% increase over the 2014 season.

These injuries keep happening in part because there’s no real way to quickly diagnose players on the field, no way to determine which players are still good to play or not. A new helmet developed by students at Texas Tech will be crucial to making sure players get the treatment they need. Their helmet can detect the location, duration, and force of an impact, as well as rotational acceleration. It then sends the information to a team of doctors, and will also send the information to linked smartphones.

The device, named Minus Tau (Tau is a protein that forms in the brain after someone gets a concussion, and is linked to dementia, suicide, and depression), can be fitted to any current helmet. Hopefully this device, combined with coaches’ and players’ willingness to get help, will make the gridiron a much safer place.